The remarkable development of language technology tools in recent years
in terms of robustness, computational speed and volume of processed
data, together with the increasing number of languages covered, made
possible their usage not only for specific research applications, but
also for real world applications which prove useful in everyday life.
Automatic correction of text, machine translation, extraction of
important information and hands-free devices are just some of these
applications. Language technology now has the maturity to be used for
addressing societal challenges such as helping people with disabilities,
the elderly and migrants.

However, due to the ambiguity and complexity of natural language, its
automatic processing is still very challenging and benefits from
processing shorter and less ambiguous information. The same is true for
people who have difficulties understanding text due to disabilities, or
who have to read texts in a language they do not have a good command of.
In all these cases, automatic text simplification can prove to be very
useful.

In contrast to controlled languages, which practically create a
sublanguage by imposing constraints on the grammar rules, discourse
style, number of words/sentence etc., text simplification eliminates or
replaces parts of sentences or paragraphs, or even reformulates them
according to specific requirements of the target user groups. Among the
most frequent techniques are: lexical substitution, verb forms
replacement (for morphologically rich languages), word order
adjustments, deletion of subordinate clauses, replacement of anaphoric
pronouns by their reference, usage of synonym expressions with higher
frequency as well as compound splitting.

This workshop intends to bring together scientists working in a variety
of fields in which text simplification can be applied, computational
linguists interested in the research problems of text simplification and
of course users who can benefit from the simplified texts.

The innovative aspect of this workshop will be the discussion on text
simplification from two perspectives: On the one hand, how computational
linguistics applications which simplify texts can be used by people in
real world situation, and on the other hand, how to simplify the input
for other NLP-based applications in order to improve their accuracy. We
also intend to develop a roadmap of activities, tools and resources on
text simplification from a multilingual perspective. A special attention
will be paid to contributions describing automatic text simplification
for less-resourced languages.

The workshop will be organised in conjunction with COLING 2014 on 23rd
or 24th August in Dublin, Ireland.